Peace

I wanted to take some time to share some things I've recently learned about Peace. I have been on a journey for eight years now and daily I have been acquiring more and more peace as I've continued seeking God's love. Because in His love there is peace and safety. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee because he strusteth in thee." Isaiah.

When we keep our minds on God, there is no room to doubt. It's when we begin living and thinking and deciding about things that we start to look away. I learned something that has truly helped me acquire Peace to the point I can't believe it's possible to feel this great!

I'll share a story.

A few weeks ago I was talking with God and still dealing with issues on "eating." I would ask God why I didn't have any self-control, why the cravings would just overtake me. I then began thinking of my life and how much I think of the future. How I try to figure out everything and all the "what if's." As I was doing this one day the Holy Spirt said, "Linda you want to know what is going to happen in the future with your life, and how you can have control over that. What I want you to do is be "open-ended." As I thought about that, I pictured myself as a goose that is trying to gather up all the chickens under her wings. She was trying to keep them protected and safe and have everything and everyone under her control. That's how God showed me I have been. And I had to agree. When I agreed that I was trying to orchestrate my own future, I confessed it to him and said, "I want to be open ended and not have any control or thoughts of what tomorrow will bring."

After that happened, I can't tell you what peace I gained! By looking into the future I was robbing myself of peace. I am low literally living one second at a time, enjoying the moment I'm in. And I've seen it even affect my work! When Friday would come around I would know I only have 2 days to do all the things I want/need to do. I would already begin thinking about having to return to work Monday - and you and I both know that robs our weekends. Now I can enjoy the weekend, not even THINKING of Monday, so that when Monday comes around I wasn't having feelings of dread. It's hard to explain, but I saw Monday as another day to be all I can be and enjoy every minute, even the commute. I found I'm being more tolerant with drivers who pass me, cut me off, etc. I have peace because I'm not trying to "control" my whole envirionment. It's opene ended, and I am not expecting anything!! I'm enjoying the moment.

It's not that I can't prepare and plan for the future, but I'm no longer trying to control my future. What a difference.

So what has this to do with self-control, a lot. Self control allows me to choose NOT to try to figure everything out. See I learned that self-control isn't just what I put my mouth or body to, but it could be what I'm thinking as well. I don't know why, but I never considered self-control as one of the fruits of the spirit, but it is. I've been working on the first few fruits that I haven't gotten down to the self-control fruit. However, now I am. And so a few weeks ago I asked the Lord for the fruit of self-control.

And I'm here to say that when we ask we shall receive. Because now I'm free! Food isn't controlling me any longer. I have control over it! Not the kind of control that is wrong, but the right kind of control - over myself - not over others or my situation. Self-control is good. I always thought that having self-control was on the verge of new-age and so I wanted no part of it. I would just do whatever I felt - to a degree - or led by the Holy Spirit - so I thought, but would never take account "If" I should do this or that. I didn't exercise self control or discipline because to me it seemed like bondage. But the truth was, now that I am exercising it, I'm more free that I ever dreamed!!! I woke up the other morning with such a peace in my heart, nothing was going on in my head! It was so quiet in there, and continues to be quiet.

I realized that all that "noise" in there was me trying to figure out the future, how we would meet ends, where we would live, etc. But now it doesn't matter, each day will take care of itself. Now I understand what that scripture means - a deep understanding. "Take no thought of the morrow, for there is enough evil in that day without adding more to it from thinking ahead." (My translation).

Do you want more peace? First continue seeking the Love of God and Ask for self-control and see what God does in your life.

Tom's Tidbits

One morning I asked Tom to make me a promise. He said promise what? I said, "You know that in 3 years we'll be married for 20 years. Will you promise that we go to Hawaii?" He said, "No, I can't make that promise, but I can promise you this… that we'll still be married in 3 years!" We both laughed… but truthfully, I am still going to plan for that trip!

Forgiveness

If any of you have followed along with my teachings, one of the areas I talk about is on forgiveness. This is a story that happened recently about forgiveness and being free.

I have a girlfriend from work and we began developing a good relationship. We would go places and do things together. She has another friend at work, they've been friends for many many years and do things together. One day it was her birthday. I talked with her that morning and she wasn't having a very good day. So I asked the friend who knows her well if she wanted to go in with me and get her some flowers or something. So we did, we even drove them over to her house and dropped them off. The next day the lady at work asked me to come by her office to see something. So I did. She showed me something our mutual friend gave her. It was lovely, a picture in a small frame. Then I asked her if she heard from our friend about the flowers we left on her step. She said, "Oh yes, she emailed me right away that day and told me how much she loved the gift." I looked at her and bit tears came into my eyes and I said, "I didn't hear from her." She looked at me and said, "Are you kidding?" And of course I wasn't. I felt a big hurt jump into my heart and I even went back to my office and cried. The pain was great. I realized that my friendship with her wasn't as important as her friendship with her other friend.

So that afternoon I went outside to just think about things. And the Lord spoke to my heart. He said, "You have put a lot of importance on a relationship that you have been pouring into. Have you ever considered she doesn't feel the same toward you?" I realized that I was trying to get back something from her that she doesn't have to give. I wanted her friendship toward me to be like mine toward her. But then had to come to grips that it wasn't. Yes, that hurt more, but when I realized it, I forgave her. I then prayed for my soul-ties be cut. The Lord healed my heart. And it actually worked because the next time I saw her, I wasn't "needing" anything from her. We are now just friends without strings. She is free to be any way she wants to be and I'm free to let her!

I think many of us make up in our heads the kind of relationship we have with people only to continually get hurt. If we continue getting hurt we have soul-ties to that person and expecting from them what we think they should give us. We have to set them free because they may not have it to give. There are some friends of mine that are so wonderful and close and love me and have lots of respect - they are easy to have relationships with. I don't have to "fix" them so they are OK. Then there are those that we have to work at. Truthfully, I have decided to cut all soul-ties (emotionall) with those individuals so that not only am I free but they are free too.

Right after that episode I saw something interesting happen. A lady friend of mine was doing the same thing to me that I was doing to my friend. This lady friend got hurt by me because I didn't invite her to our wedding anniversary party. Truthfully, she was on my list but accidently skipped her. So she made it clear to me that she knew I had a party without her - in so many words - indicating she was feeling rejected. She wouldn't feel rejected if she didn't put so much importance on the response she expected from me. I don't' see her has a real close friend, but I found out recently she thinks of me as a real close friend. See how things can get so out of scale? We need to allow each of us to make decisions without us being adversely emotionally affected. I have since talked with this friend and restore our relationship because it was a misunderstanding. But the truth remains, I'm not free and she's not free as long as I feel I have to make her "OK" all the time. Yes, we need to be considerate and the minute I realized she was hurt I went to her, but we can't go around keeping everyone fixed! We will lose our peace so fast and fall into fear and control and manipulation.

Pass it On

Something happened recently that I thought may encourage some of you. I have a friend at work and we've been really enjoying each other - it's very mutual. I went into her office and she said, "I'm very grouchy this morning. I went to the cafeteria to get some breakfast and the cook was very rude to me. I just wanted to slap him. I did tell the cashier about it. Now I feel so cranky and yucky!" I smiled and said, "You took on his junk. The very way he's being toward you is now what you'll be toward others! If we don't forgive the person we will "pass it on."

I began sharing a story I saw on "Touched by an Angel." There was a restaurant and the waitress was having a bad day. She snapped at one of her customers. As the customer left the restaurant he snapped and was rude to the cashier. The cashier went on break and was rude and mean and nasty to a co-worker. That co-worker went home and had a horrible evening with his family. And it just went on and on like that. Every person was touched by some "junk" that another put upon them. But they went back and redid that whole scene and the customer who was snapped at only responded with love and compassion and asked if anything was wrong they could help with. Right then the fuse stopped, the awful feelings didn't pass onto the customer and all that chain reaction never happened.

I told my friend, "When we forgive a bad attitude toward us QUICKLY we won't get anything off on us. Then we can pray for that person because they MUST be miserable. A person can only give what they have." So she took a few minutes to forgive the person, and came by and said, "I'm better now."

Forgiving quickly will stop the chain reaction of bad tempers, anger, to get off on us thereby it won't get on others!

You Must Be Born Again - by Pete Plitt

In John 3:1-12, Nick comes up to Jesus in the darkness of night.. Jesus, ignoring his accolades, begins to reveal to this teacher of the law the need to be Born Again. Stuck at the idea of being physically born a second time, Jesus elaborates, explaining that there is a birth of flesh, but also one of spirit.

From a collection of different verses, being born again, getting saved, or "trusting Jesus," as it is know in some circles, involves various words and actions like, confessing sins, repenting, confessing Jesus as Savior and Lord, usually with copious encouragements to get in the Word, pray, and go to church. But what exactly is happening when one gets Born Again, and why is it necessary to do?

In Genesis 3, the Adam's family is enjoying a stroll in the garden. The serpent starts in on Eve, Adam being there with her, [Gen. 3:6]. Does this creature and all his wild ideas have something? What are these new ideas he speaks of? How is one to know? Were's the evidence to substantiate what this being is saying? Without any visible evidence or proof, our original parents would have to make a leap of faith, a decision based on fabrication, by an act of their own will. Actually, their actions were very Hebrews 11:1, that is, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Eve was convinced from the WORDS presented - Genesis 3:6 "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat." They chose to believe contrary to what they knew to be true by experience, that is, walking with their loving Creator, and went with the fiction. Now that's faith, only backwards. The sad part is that too often we do the same. We choose to entertain a fable of fear or lack in contradiction to God's promises. Backwards faith.

The Bible records that the Serpent "beguiled" [deluded, seduced] Eve, it doesn't say the Serpent forced the forbidden "fruit" on her. So they exercised their God given power of choice, believing without proof this stranger and his fantastic claims, thus plunging the entire human race into centuries of death and destruction. Romans 5:12 & 14 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned," and "Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come." Though we didn't sin the same sin as Adam, we still got dirtied by it. The misuse of their blind faith and free will enslaved every person born from that time on.

Now let's go back to the day that we became Born Again. The details will obviously vary from person to person, but there are two factors that were true for us all. We learned of this Stranger Who really loved us and wanted to be our Friend, even to the extent of becoming one of us in order to die in our behalf and rescue us from our own demise. Whether we were taught about God from diapers on, or born to a family of God haters, we had to choose to believe or not believe this amazing story. On an individual basis, we had to literally reverse the choice that Adam had made for all people which resulted in separation from God, and exercise our faith by an act of our free will to live for and with our Creator, completing the gift of salvation and restoration. Along with everything else that being Born Again is, the tag team of blind faith and choice by exercising personal will is how we all obtained it.

Thanks to Adam's will gone awry, there's not one person on this planet who has not been negatively impacted, be it sickness in mind or body, loss of life or substance, even hang nails are a bummer, not to forget eternity's down side. If we can appreciate the magnitude, the far reaching effects of what Adam did in condemning the world, then we may begin to really appreciate the gift of Jesus, the gift of the rebirth, the gift of Grace. Romans 5:17 "For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; MUCH MORE they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ." Also, 1 Timothy 2:4-6 "Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time," God's will for ALL of us, as Timothy points out, is that we ALL get saved by knowledge of His truth. This was demonstrated by His astounding plan of action to restore us to Himself which began by promise, and was completed at the cross. The misplaced authority that Adam exercised by choosing to trust the deceiver was neutralized by the blood of Jesus, yet if not accessed, changes nothing. Again, in Timothy it is clear that God's will for us all is salvation, but what we do with this awesome gift of His is the point here and demands necessary focus.

When Nicodemus was told that he must be born again, even as a "master" of the Jews, he thought with the same mental shroud as we all had when we operated with the nature of sin. Reversing the ravages of sin on an individual basis, now that the work of salvation is a completed event, is the most important decision we will ever make [or have made]. It is just as easy, or difficult, as was the leap that our created parents made. Our faith gives substance to whatever we choose to embrace, and the fruit of that is self revealing. Exerting our right to decide that eternal life with God is true, in spite of the seeming lack of evidence, is an exact parallel to us standing next to Adam and Eve in the Garden, being convincingly lied to by the serpent, but instead of selecting from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil [the realm of the senses], we instead harvest from the Tree of Life [the realm of faith]. As a result, individually, it is as though we had never been stained with the original sin. Even if we fall, we can immediately repent and get back on the Life track. Sure we still wait on the redemption of our bodies, but that promise to us is every bit as real as was the promise of the Savior to King David when he and his men ate the shew bread meant only for the priests of his day. He understood that God's promises of future events are more real and reliable than what we see with our eyes or feel in our emotions. In like manner, we implement the reality of our new bodies, to one degree or another, every time we refuse to let sickness reign in our mortal bodies because "by His stripes we are healed." Salvation is a package deal, impacting us spirit, soul and body.

Hebrews 10:16-19 "This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them; And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin. Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus." That day is now, that covenant is now. God is not remembering our sins. We have no past. However, the choice in whom we trust, what we believe, and the consequences of those choices, are totally ours.

I hope you have enjoyed this month's newsletters. See you next time!

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